Jesusl I find the HEBDO cartoons so over the top that I consider anyone who cannot laugh their head off at them to be he worst of dunces. So the question of dissonance between intent and effect does not arise for me. And if they changed as Jeff suggests they do the way Crumb & other American cartoonists changed I think they would lose the ability to make me laugh., The question of political correctness - HEBDO is beyond that! Well, as to senstitivities: what makes Islamists so hyper-sensitive to the slightest of slights? Perhaps HEBDO has not done a good enough job in getting them to laugh at themselves?

They ought to be got to laugh so hard that they implode instead of massacre cartoonits etc.

Religion has been defined as “the opium of the masses” & it appears and it has been said that within the context of homo {allegedly) sapiens's development from the dawning questioning of the whys and wherefores of existence religion served a palliative narrative function, and it did so, invariably by elevating immediate, family relations into a godly status, into supernal realms. That stage allegedly constituted the infancy of reason and it produced priests who served to maintain the various truth claims & ensure obedience to various rules and rituals, and did so for the powerful who had and continue to have vested interests in uniformity of belief.

(The need for “belief” in this context can be regarded as a form of “addiction.”)

Retrospectively, these elevations, in the form of revered images & architecture & music & texts & practices are regarded as having artistic value, enticements, embellishments – i.e. attend Mass at the Cathedral of Burgos on Todos Santos and how can you not be (at least secretly) an addict to Catholicism for the rest of your life!

Focusing on the three sectarian-prone major strains of the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity & Islam – it becomes evident that no matter their common ancestry (and what commonalities they continue to share) each of them makes the claim to be the only true and valid one; indoctrinate their children in their beliefs & oppose any divergence from these norms, and tend to be vengeful when its claims are attacked, and when a split occurs, most famously currently the one between Shiites & Sunnis: in other words each religion exhibits certain all too human-beastly qualities, one of which is narcissistic sensitivity. Judaism, except until very recently, until the founding of Israel (that is within the time span of intra-religious warfare of these three strains) has not been in the position to commit the kinds of conversion slaughter that, historically, marks the spread of Christianity & of Islam and of the sectarian warfare within Christianity and Islam, although Judaism, too, is marked by differentiations into sects.

Recent history would make one believe that the adherents of Islam are especially hyper-sensitive to any form of disrespect of their beliefs, and indeed it seems to takes little to get masses of them to mount outraged demonstrations, let us just think back to the split that produced the states of India and Pakistan; historically, Christianity & Hinduism, however, have proved equally sensitive. So it is not a matter of which or what religion but of human identification with one or the other of them that appears to be at stake, and critique, lack of respect, of the slightest kind can elicit the most violent response by those whose apparently fragile identity is threatened. The volatility of the issue is evident from the reaction of the one LIVING expansionist religion within secularized Europe (and of course a hundredfold more in the region that stretched from the Far to the Near East and farther West). Nationalism can serve the same identity-forming purposes and critiques of it elicit the same ferocious responses; fundamentalisms of various kinds are as tetchy as ever to burn witches.

Within that historical context and within the context of French history the very existence of an equal opportunity offender satirical magazine like Charlie Hebdo & its marvelously puerile ENTIRELY OVER THE TOP caricatures is unique: after all, you can be formally sentenced to death for far lesser forms of lack of respect in many an Islamic state and, informally, murdered en masse by ISIL & its LARGE variety of similar manifestations of fundamentalist Islam.

The Islamist reactions to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons thus show deadly humorlessness, although I wonder whether certain sitting Israeli ducks, subjected to the same treatment, would be welcomed with the same laughter.